Microsoft Releases 125 Million Building Footprints In the US To the OpenStreetMap Community (mspoweruser.com) 58
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSPoweruser: Today, Microsoft announced that it is releasing 124 Million building footprints in the United States to the OpenStreetMap community. Bing Maps team used Microsoft's CNTK Unified Toolkit to apply its Deep Neural Networks and the ResNet34 with RefineNet up-sampling layers to detect building footprints from the Bing imagery. OpenStreetMap currently has 30,567,953 building footprints in the U.S., thanks to editor contributions and various city or county wide imports. Using DNNs and Bing Imagery, Microsoft has extracted 124,885,597 footprints in the United States and making it available for download free of charge.
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Dear Sub-Human Filth,
I'm appealing to all of you stupid idiots to vote Democrat in 2018. That is if you have the basic education enough to read a ballot, anyway. I understand the majority of you racist rednecks can't even read this post, though. But those who can, please pass my message on to the rest of your inbred family.
We Democrats are morally, culturally and intellectually superior to you in every way. I will qualify myself by noting that I have a Liberal Arts degree from a college, which you obviously
Microsoft has redeemed itself. (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't like the Microsoft of the 1990s and the early 2000s, but I like the Microsoft of today. Between open sourcing so much of .NET, and giving us the excellent VS Code, and giving us TypeScript, and giving us excellent contributions like this mapping stuff, I think it has redeemed itself. I'd much rather use Microsoft software these days than software from Google or Apple or especially Red Hat. That's how much things have changed: Microsoft has repeatedly improved my Linux experience with stuff like open source .NET and VS Code, while Red Hat has ruined it thanks to junk like systemd, PulseAudio, GNOME 3 and Wayland. Some anti-Microsoft fools will probably make false accusations about me being 'a paid shill for MS', but the reality is that I'm just an uncompensated and satisfied user of their software. As strange as it is to say it, Microsoft is the company that has improved my Linux experience the most over the past 4 to 5 years.
Re:Microsoft has redeemed itself. (Score:4, Insightful)
I had to use Windows 10 this week. I'd say MS is a long way from redeemed.
Of course, a company that size is not a monolith.
Re:Microsoft has redeemed itself. (Score:5, Insightful)
M$ is moving toward SaaS. They're doing it with Office and Windows is next I suspect. Win10 was "free" for a while IMHO because they've loaded the start menu with ads that they're making money off of. Think about that for a second - think about how many Windows installs there are in the world. Now think about Microsoft getting money every time they click on their start menu. Every time is an impression. I mean, I'm guessing that's their model anyway (per impression) but I could very well be wrong.
Aside from the above rant, Win10 (again, just MHO) is no better than Win7. It just has an updated UI and different methods of accessing the same things. It's no more stable, the updates are far less vetted and less stable and the user privacy issues for even using it makes me vomit in my mouth (and I don't even use it). I honestly don't see how the matador-esque marketing strategy has lasted this long to keep people buying their stuff. They definitely have momentum on their side.
I'm really sorry. I don't want to sound like I'm ungrateful for all of the GOOD things Microsoft has done, I am. They've done things I can't fathom to progress technology as a whole. They've got a lot of great, dedicated devs and there's a LOT to be said for keeping a company so successful for so long. And I'm really happy that they're joining the FOSS train - it's great to see them stop treating it like a competitor, because eventually it would have eventually starved them of air. Their SaaS model shift proves that they understand this, and it's a smart move. I grew up loving DOS just as much as I now love Linux. I just progressed past Microsoft products and onto Linux around 1993 when Windows '95 started putting all sorts of unnecessary junk in the root of my hard drive.
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Hahaha, sorry - obvious typo, I started dabbling in Linux around 1996 actually. 1993 would have been a *very* early beta of Win95 ;}
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It just has an updated UI and different methods of accessing the same things.
An obvious failing on Microsoft's side if that's all you think that has changed. But then that's a victim of it's success. The big changes under the hood are never noticed by end users or not properly registered.
A few of my noteworthy things would be: Connected Standby, improved security model, far better highDPI interface scaling, multiple desktops, increases in the support of ASLR, better memory management, better performance (not like in bloat that's is getting bigger faster than an American policeoffice
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I had to use Windows 10 this week. I'd say MS is a long way from redeemed.
You are conflating incompetence with evil. MS is still incompetent, and their software is still terrible, but their evilness has greatly diminished.
Of course, this is not by choice, but because they no longer have the market power to impose their will. For instance, they have realized they have lost the mapping battle. So they are throwing their data open, at little cost to themselves, as a spoiler for Google and Apple, but to the benefit of the public.
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but their evilness has greatly diminished.
Of course, this is not by choice, but because they no longer have the market power to impose their will.
I read your first line and was about to respond with the second. So: ACTUAL evil declined since they've lost market power, but let's face it, their POTENTIAL evil is about the same if they could. Does that really count as a loss of evil?
OTOH I don't think _anybody_ wants the Thought Police to start making rounds, so I guess that it does.
Hmmm, does that say something about Absolute Market Share and Power? I know, let's create MORE ISP and news/entertainment monopolies!
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Yeah, Dave, when are you going to Open Source the beer in the cellar? Fascist!
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Yeah, Dave, when are you going to Open Source the beer in the cellar? Fascist!
It's free as in "speech," not as in "beer."
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Spoken like a true spambot.
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everything but windows is alright to me. this operating system is like a god damn prison
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Not really, but they have understood the benefits of sharing. Free advertising mostly. Keep the name in the news for positive reasons.
Having a large developer base is another goal, keeping the ecosystem relatively popular and inexpensive.
It's all still for selfish reasons, and the main face of Microsoft, aka Windows 10, is pure selfish.
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You're such a lying shill.
Has Microsoft dropped its patent attacks on Linux and Android? No.
Have they dropped their closed MOOXML format and accepted instead Open Document Format? No.
Have they stopped shipping buggy, spyware software? No.
Try harder, shill. You're not giving them their money's worth.
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I was one of Microsoft's harshest critics back in the 90s, but the ugly reality is we were better under their monopoly than we are today. E.g. even at the height of their monopoly, MS would never have had the gall to demand a 30% cut of every single sale of any software ever made for the Windows platform (yet this absurd 'new normal' is the situation developers are in with the Apple and Google duopoly - and most developers today even think it's normal that the OS developer should take a massive cut just for
Whatever improves OSM is good news (Score:5, Interesting)
No matter where it comes from.
Thanks to Microsoft for this contribution. Hope to see some more out of the USoA (where I am from).
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PS: Now, if you guys could also Fix Win10, would be even better.
I use MacOS, but still have to go back to Win10 from time to time, and get an awful experience each and every time.
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Windows 10 is not that terrible. Sure, they keep annoying me with ugly backgrounds that I can vote down on the login screen, but once I'm logged in, open Steam and start a game, Windows isn't too annoying.
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Yes, for me is the Same, I bootcamp for games, and VBox for Project, Visio, and Various IPMI and iLO crap (using a rawvmdk of course). But each and every time, is a lithany of past due upgrades of everything microsoft and not microsoft. And twice a year, is the crap of feature upgrades.
Let alone when family and friends ask for "a little help with a little problem that ought not have to take more than five minutes" .
So, yes, is Annoying
And yes, Your comment should be modded funny
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It's still pretty terrible.
It continues to break the WiFi and touchpad drivers on my laptop when installing updates. Last month I spent two days fixing it - not easy to fix your WiFi without working Internet connection, resorted to tethering over Bluetooth through my phone to my home WiFi - and in the end the solution was to install Win8 drivers. Reinstalling the Win10 drivers didn't work this time, probably because the old (working) drivers were gone when I cleaned up the hard disk to get rid of old, unuse
Microsoft long time supporter of OpenStreetMap (Score:1)
They have made their Bing satellite imagery available to the OSM community for many years now. OSM as it exists today would not be possible without MIcrosofts' support.
It's a trap (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a trap.
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Well, that's my first thought as well. But a trap for what? What's there to lose for OSM, really? It's an independent project, the mapping data is open, everyone can copy and fork it were MS to manage to fully take over. This assuming MS is releasing the data under a proper (sufficiently permissive) license.
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Perhaps to let OSM use the data and then a litigation comes out of nowhere from a "third party" (Like SCO, which is funded by Microsoft) to sue OSM for using the data. Doeesn't matter if they can use the data legally, as long as they can drag the litigation out long enough it could hurt OSM.
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